Talk:Spock Must Die!
suggest a copyedit for :Spock Must Die! is the first original Star Trek novel, although that claim is sometimes attributed to the slightly-more-aimed-at-children novel Mission to Horatius. this is a very roundabout way of saying that "Spock Must Die! is not the first original Star Trek novel" -- Captain M.K.B. 18:07, 8 February 2007 (UTC). *fumes* Do whatever with the sentence. I'm getting used to this! Stripey. :i was just wondering what you think would be best -- perhaps saying it is "the first original Star Trek novel in a series"?? -- Captain M.K.B. 19:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC) A bit much? Did someone transcribe a book onto this article or what? – AT2Howell 18:18, 28 July 2009 (UTC) :Blimey! Yes way too much and not what our style and formatting rules call for at all. Any objects to deleting the current "Annotations" section? --8of5 10:33, 29 July 2009 (UTC) ::I'd say remove it to the talk page. There are some valid annotations there -- they're unfortunately formatted like they were scribbled on a roll of toilet paper. -- Captain MKB 12:24, 29 July 2009 (UTC) Delete it, or at least edit it down. – AT2Howell 12:25, 29 July 2009 (UTC) Removed from page Annotations Chapter One: McCOY WITHOUT BONES Page 1 The chapter title plays on the name of one of the characters, Dr. Leonard McCoy, and his nickname, "Bones." "An editor at Bantam copyedited Kirk's reference to McCoy from "Bones" to "Doc," apparently being unfamiliar to the reference to McCoy's oft-used on screen nickname. Author James Blish wrote a piece about the error in the introduction of a later novelization." (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!) The "Captain's Log" is recorded by Captain James T. Kirk. Star Date 4011.9: In earlier media the modern, conventional form of "stardate" had not yet become standardized. The stardate here is essentially random, but seems to follow Gene Roddenberry's explanation in The Making of Star Trek: "This time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability. It has little relationship to Earth's time as we know it. One hour aboard the USS Enterprise at different times may equal as little as three Earth hours. The stardates specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading." It is difficult to parse exactly why these dates were chosen. The regressive stardate from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 may indicate a course change, back towards Earth. Otherwise, the stardates move consistently forward, with larger gaps in time having larger differences in stardates. Each chapter has a different stardate: Chapter 1: 4011.9 Chapter 2: 4011.8 (The stardate regresses.) Chapter 3: 4018.4 Chapter 4: 4019.2 Chapter 5: 4020.8 Chapter 6: 4150.0 (A period of 3 months has passed.) Chapter 7: 4181.6 Chapter 8: 4194.4 Chapter 9: 4194.6 Chapter 10: 4196.2 Chapter 11: 4198.0 Chapter 12: 4200.9 Chapter 13: 4201.6 Chapter 14: 4202.0 Chapter 15: 4205.5 Klingon Empire Montgomery "Scotty" Scott "I found Blish's dialogue for Scotty to be a fairly elaborate depiction of a Scottish brogue. Apparently Blish took greater pains to be accurate with brogue than even James Doohan. Thankfully though, most Trek novelists emulate Doohan and keep it simple." (Badowski; http://keithbadowski.blogspot.com/2007/11/spock-must-die-by-james-blish.html) Page 2 transporter: Blish explains the transporter in a way that is consistent with, but slightly different from, established continuity. divorce: The information on McCoy's divorce comes from early script treatments for the TOS episode "The Way to Eden", written by D.C. Fontana. space service: Blish, writing before the terminology of Star Trek had become standardized, uses this term instead of Starfleet. Joanna McCoy: Originally, the episode "The Way to Eden" was titled "Joanna," the title character being Dr. McCoy's daughter. In the animated episode "The Survivor" we learn about Joanna McCoy. She had attended school on Cerberus. She was there when Cerberus experienced a crop failure and the entire population was in jeopardy of starvation; fortunately, the planet was saved by Carter Winston's philanthropy. Page 3 transporter: Scotty explains: "What the transporter does is analyze the energy state of each particle in the body and then produce a Dirac jump to an equivalent state somewhere else." Here Blish is tying the technology of Star Trek to the technology of his own books and works. Blish was fascinated with the work of Dirac, and used his work as the basis of much of the future technology he wrote about. In Cities in Flight, by Blish, the great cities of Earth have left; gone into orbit using the spindizzy, a device that counters gravity. The spindizzy was described as the result of the "Blackett-Dirac" equations. The cities travel from star to star looking for work. They communicate using the Dirac transmitter, which allows instantaneous communication across the galaxy. The first use of the Dirac communicator was in Blish's story "Beep" (1954). (http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=844) "Beep" was later expanded into the novel The Quincunx of Time in 1973. logical positivism: solipsism: Page 4 McCoy breaks into a philosophical discussion of what could be called "the transporter problem." The basic idea is that when you are broken down and duplicated elsewhere, are you still the same person? Does your soul travel with you? Similarly in Budrys's Rogue Moon there is a transmitter which produces duplicates on the Moon of human beings on Earth to explore the question, "what constitutes human identity?" (Ketterer; 266) "...Blish's one original contribution to the Star Trek saga, Spock Must Die! (1970), has the duplication element in common with both his own and Lowndes's The Duplicated Man and the early Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within," it may well have been most significantly inspired by his reading of Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, the book Blish alludes to in his Mission to the Heart of the Stars and hails as a masterpiece in a 1961 review." (Ketterer; 266) (Blish; More Issues at Hand; 59-66) Page 5 Spock Mind-lock: McCoy here refers to the Vulcan mind meld, which saved his life (and the lives of Kirk and Scotty in the episode "Spectre of the Gun." Page 6 Klingon War: The Organians in the episode "Errand of Mercy" prevented the Klingon War. United Federation of Planets Chapter Two: BEHIND THE LINES Page 7 "This arm of the galaxy..." At this point the universe of Star Trek was only nebulously understood. The Milky Way Galaxy has two major arms, and even at maximum warp it would take a long time to reach the other arm. We now understand the geography of Star Trek to be mostly constrained in our arm of the galaxy only. Hikaru Sulu Uhura Page 8 "...all seventeen Star bases." As is cited in The Making of Star Trek. Page 9 Bantu: Blish identifies Uhura as Bantu here, for the first time. Shapely Center: The center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This indicates that the Enterprise is exploring the other spiral arm of the galaxy when the book opens. Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Tachyons Page 14 Hilbert space Scotty lays out a plan to alter the transporter so that it sends a tachyon duplicate to its destination, while not altering or affecting the original. The tachyon duplicate can then be discarded after use. The effect extends the distance of transport by a large margin. Page 15 Chapter Three: THE TANK TRAP Page 16 Ayelborne: An Organian Claymare: An Organian Trefayne: An Organian Page 17 n-dimensional space Page 18 "The worst problem, however, comes early in the book: When these two Spocks materialize simultaneously in the transporter chamber, everyone stares at them in astonishment, trying to find a difference between them- and no one notices that one's shirt insignia is on the wrong side? The entire story hinges on this item: that nobody, including Kirk, noticed this difference at a time when they were specifically looking for differences." (Mitchell) Spock is duplicated, and to avoid confusion Kirk dubs them: Spock-One: a mirror, tachyon replicate of Spock Spock-Two: the original Spock Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Kirk gives Spock-One his class ring, to differentiate between the two Spocks. Spock hands over his own Command Academy ring (which has never been seen in an episode.) "When Kirk finds himself faced with two seemingly identical Spocks, he decides to tell them apart by trading Starfleet Academy class rings with one. Now, I've seen every one of those original seventy-nine episodes multiple times, and I don't recall EVER seeing a Starfleet Academy class ring." (Mitchell) Spock mentions that besides Kirk and himself, no one else on board has ever stood for command. Page 23 Kirk mentions a time Spock was willing to kill him. A reference to "Amok Time." Page 24 Spocklike: I believe this to be the first use of the word in print. Korzybski: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference." Page 25 Chapter Four: A PROBLEM IN DETECTION Page 26 "all ten periods of the day": Kirk refers here to a decimal clock, a logical invention by Blish given the decimal accuracy of stardates. Janice Rand: She was already out of the show by the end of season one. Her inclusion in this novel, set after the events of the original series, is of interest. Christine Chapel: "Perhaps an interesting effect of having a British writer take on characters devised and developed by Americans is the treatment of women. While Yeoman Rand and Nurse Chapel are little more than window dressing (excepting the times they are wooed by the likes of Khan) in TOS episodes, Blish liberates them in his book. Besides a passing reference to Kirk and Rand's dalliances, it is the women who are sexually-charged and motivated in this treatment. Even Uhura (getting more lines and responsibilities in this book than any movie or TOS chapter) gets in on the act." It should be noted that Blish is an American, but otherwise this is an interesting point. (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1521594) Page 27 The reference to Christine Chapel's "broken romance" is from the episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Page 27-28 Blish (through the character of Kirk) puts forth two theories as to why women found Spock so attractive. The female fan response to Spock was a large factor in early Star Trek fandom. Many hundreds of pages of early fan writing explored this idea. 1. "...challenge-and-response situation: he may be cold and unresponsive to other women, but if I had the chance, I could get through to him!" 2. "...most white crewwomen, still the inheritors after two centuries of vestiges of the shameful racial prejudice of their largely Anglo-American forebears, saw in the Vulcan half-breed- who after all had not sprung from any Earthly colored stock- a 'safe' way of breaking with those vestigial prejudices- and at the same time, perhaps, satisfying the sexual curiosity which had probably been at the bottom of them from the beginning." In a letter to Karin Laflin Adams Blish refers to his surprise at the fact his two explanations for the "female passion for Spock" "have not drawn much comment... I thought a lot of people would be livid over the racial one". (Ketterer; 358) Blish then counters these theories with two more, this time through the character of McCoy. 1. "...Spock...is thoroughly superior specimen of the male animal- brave, intelligent, prudent, loyal, highly placed in his society- you name it, he's got it. What sensible woman wouldn't want such a man?" 2. "They can see that Spock's not a whole man. That compulsive inability of his to show emotions cripples him, and they want to free him... to be the whole, grownup, near superman he hasn't quite become, and make themselves good enough for that man." Page 28 cancer: James Blish died of cancer in 1975. Kirk thought cancer was "licked" a hundred years ago. McCoy tells him that some forms still exist: "...men of one hundred percent Earth stock, who have avenues for emotional discharge as inadequate as Mr. Spock's, are terribly susceptible to it in their middle years..." David Ketterer suggests that, "This aside has nothing directly to do with the plot of Spock Must Die! and was presumably dictated by Blish's personal predicament. It does suggest, however, that Blish identified with Spock, and when one recalls that one possible use for the Rogue Moon matter transmitter was to cure cancer, there is room to wonder if the replicate Spock does not amount to a projection of the cancerous Blish." (Ketterer; 268) McCoy was never trained in the details of "Vulcanian biochemistry." Vulcanian: the simpler term "Vulcan" has a more common and accepted usage in Star Trek today. Page 29 Page 30 Vulcans can fast for a long time. Page 31 Page 32 Kirk makes Sulu the first officer pro tem, after dismissing both Spocks from the post. Since Scotty is busy working on the transporter problem, this makes sense. Sulu is fourth in command. Pro tem: short for pro tempore, Latin for "for the time being" Another reference to the episode "Amok Time." The "cutlery" on the walls of Spock's walls is described as "...vaguely and misleadingly Oriental in design..." reminding Kirk of Vulcan's violent past. Page 33 Kirk mentions General Order Number One: Commonly referred to as the Prime Directive, General Order #1 prohibits interference by Starfleet with other cultures, particularly those of an inferior technological level. Page 34 William of Occam The Law of Parsimony is also known as Occam's Razor. At this point it is revealed that the duplicate Spock might be evil, an idea explored in the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within." "Yes, there sure are similarities between this story and the Start Trek episode "The Enemy Within" where two versions of Kirk are created, one good and one evil. Oddly, Blish never makes reference to this earlier situation. And the Spock duplication is different in that one Spock is entirely the real, original Spock. The replicate is his mirror image, including the area of personality. There is no goal of merging the two back together, as was the case with Kirk- only determination of who is the replicate so he may be destroyed." (Badowski) Chapter Five: ON THE OTHER HAND... Page 35 Page 35-36 While it is stated here that Vulcans have perfect bilateral symmetry, and no appendix, this is contradicted by the episode "A Private Little War" when McCoy states that Spock's heart where the human liver is. "The two Spocks can't be told apart until McCoy decides to bring in electron-microscope technology -- a casual exam can't distinguish between the two, because, we're told, Vulcan internal anatomy is bilaterally symmetrical. BUT, the series had already established that this is not the case: Vulcans' hearts are located in the lower right chest (remember McCoy's classic line, 'His heart is where his liver should be'). The book is based on a notion that is in direct contradiction to the series." (Mitchell) Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 The Klingons claim to have scored a major victory against the Federation Fleet in the Great Nebula area of Orion. The Klingons call the area "New Suns Space." It is the closest area of star formation to Earth. Chapter 6: NOBODY AT HOME Page 40 Three months pass. Spock-One puts himself on "iron rations" from McCoy's lab. Blish is apparently unaware of Vulcan's copper-based blood. Page 41 nano-jiffy: A slang term for very fast. In computing, the "jiffy" is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. "Nano" means a billionth. Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Kirk comparing Spock-One to Shylock is reference to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare's works, of course, run through the fabric of Star Trek throughout its history. Page 46 Chapter Seven: THE ATTACK Page 47 "The first sentence of Starfleet Academy's Fundamentals of Naval Engagement reads: 'The chief obstacle facing a Starship Captain who wishes to join battle is that battle is almost impossible to join.'" Page 48 Blish refers to three small Klingon vessels as "corvettes" and the large one as a "cruiser." Kirk suggests sending Starfleet a message using Swahili, which the Klingons can't translate, similar to the use of Navajo code talkers during World War II. Page 48-49 Uhura suggests sending messages in Eurish to confound the Klingons. Anthony Burgess, in characterizing the language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, declared it "Eurish." (Burgess credits Michael Frayn with the term in his 1968 book, Re Joyce, a book that Blish was undoubtedly familiar with. According to Burgess, "Joyce's language is a weird sort of pan-European...with Asiatic loan-words added. Pun-European rather." Uhura describes it as "...the synthetic language James Joyce invented for his last novel...it contains forty or fifty other languages, including slang in all of them." "Blish was possibly the most intelligent man writing science fiction in his particular time, the fifties and sixties...and he never made any secret of his admiration for James Joyce. Joycean influences are most apparent in A Case of Conscience, whose Jesuit hero spends the whole book struggling with a moral problem raised by Finnegans Wake; Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, two novels about black magic; and the short story "Common Time," which presents an unusually strange race of aliens called the clinesterton beademungen (which turns out to mean "blessed are they who snore in bed", a very Joycean pun)." (http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/joyce_influence_authors.html) See also: annotations to page 76 Page 49 quark: the word was indeed coined by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. The quote is, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." Page 50-54 Kirk orchestrates a maneuver that has never been tried before. Using a deflector beam and a tractor beam, he plants a mine through the warp field and into the trajectory of the Klingon Cruiser. Then the Enterprise sweeps in and makes short work of the corvettes. Page 51 radiolarian: any of three classes (Acantharia, Polycystina, and Phaeodaria) of usually spherical chiefly planktonic marine protozoans having radiating threadlike pseudopodia and often a siliceous skeleton of spicules. Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Chapter Eight: SPOCKS ON TRIAL Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Kirk executes a quick draw with his phaser. It is noted that he had ancestors in "America's Far West." (In the original script for "Spectre of the Gun" Kirk mandates 15 minutes a day in quick draw practice for the entire crew.) (http://www.fastcopyinc.com/orionpress/articles/last_gunfight.htm) Kirk mentions Easter, a rare mention of a contemporary holiday in Star Trek. Chapter Nine: THE MAN IN THE MIRROR Page 62 ion exchange column counter-current distributor: A method of separation of two or more substances by repeated distribution between two immiscible liquid phases that move past each other in opposite directions. It is a form of liquid-liquid chromatography. James Blish trained as a biologist and worked for Pfizer after WWII. His knowledge of chemistry and chemistry equipment and techniques is first rate. Page 63 Pavel Chekov "?" he said with his eyebrows.: An unusual sentence Page 64 McCoy states, "...retraining of left-handed children to become right handed...is the direct and only cause of stuttering." This is known as the Orton-Travis theory and in the 1930s was very popular. It is unsubstantiated by evidence. McCoy should know that. (Theoretical Issues in Stuttering; Ann Packman, Joseph S. Attanasio; 2004 Psychology Press, page 47) Page 65 Mr. Holmes: A reference to Sherlock Holmes, who is revealed as one of Spock's ancestors in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Amino acids: "The reversal of Spock's cells corresponds nicely, it should be noted, with the nature of cancerous cells, and Spock One's eating difficulty anticipates Blish's in the last year of his life." (Ketterer; 268) aspargine Levulo-rotary: left bending Dextro-rotary: right bending Page 66 Page 67 Spock-One steals a shuttlecraft and makes it warp-capable. Page 68 Chapter Ten: A SCOTCH VERDICT The chapter title is another pun, on Scotty's name, and on a Scottish legal term meaning "not proven." Page 69 Carbohydrates can be safely eaten by Spock-One, as they lack alternative molecular forms. Page 70 A Klingon "Star Class battleship" is mentioned. "Ready when you are, Gridley." During the Battle of Manila Bay, May 1998, Admiral Dewey pronounced the order, "You may fire when ready, Gridley." Page 71 Page 72 "Who's on first?" Kirk references the famous Abbott and Costello routine. Polymorphonuclear leukocytes "Dinna be sae sure," Scott said darkly, "that electrons don't think." Page 73-74 Chronon: smallest possible into which time can be divided. Page 73 McCoy conjectures that tachyons may be units of thought. Page 74 Inverse square law: Vulcankind: like "human kind" Miltonic: A reference to John Milton, another literary figure Star Trek will draw on in its history. Page 75 Page 76 Astronomical units: Sulu is to assume command again. "Very stiff Eurish- what's called the Dalton recension." A recension is a critical revision of a text incorporating the most plausible elements found in varying sources. This is another joke based on late 1960's James Joyce criticism in general and Finnegans Wake in particular. Jack Dalton, in 1966, on the occasion of the 25th birthday of Finnegans Wake, in the festschrift (a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar) Twelve and a Tilly, called for a complete and thorough overhaul and restoration of the entire text. He suggested that the text of Finnegans Wake might require as many as 7000 emendations. (Jack Dalton, "Advertisement for the Restoration," Twelve and a Tilly, eds. Jack Dalton and Clive Hart, London: Faber and Faber, 1966. 119-37. 129) (http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/Soundbite.htm) Dalton's position was controversial at the time, and has become more controversial over the years, especially after the publication of a "corrected" Ulysses by Hans Walter Gabler in 1984. This edition was promptly criticized as having too many so-called emendations, and the controversy continues to this day. (http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/GJS4/GJS4%20RJE%20Corrected%20Text.htm) What Blish suggests is that someone at Starfleet responded to Uhura in a form of Eurish influenced by Dalton, and that as a result of such meddling with the text the language has become stiff and therefore less lively. "...the ghost of a fat African chuckle..." It is difficult to understand exactly what this line means. The closest I can figure is that Blish means a deep and throaty "hehe" but only the suggestion of such. Page 77 Page 78 Chapter Eleven: CUE FOR NIGHTMARE Page 79 Transporter range: sixteen thousand miles Page 80 McCoy doles out tranquillizer and antidepressant pills Caernarvon: A castle in Scotland. Commander Kor "...Organia's sun was a first-generation star..." This would make it one of the first and oldest stars in the galaxy. Page 81 Caledonian tone: Caledonian here simply means "Scottish." Page 82 Kirk had only seen a crutch once before, in a museum. Page 83 Thermionic valves - vacuum tubes Kirk was on the southern seacoast of Spain once, on holiday from the Academy. Page 84 Kirk had a bout of Vegan rickettsial fever on his first training assignment. Presumably a disease Kirk contracted on a planet in orbit of Vega. The odor of the medicine the colonists had to offer was of seaweed, formaldehyde and coffee. Page 85 Page 86 Thirty Years' War Page 87 Page 88 Chapter Twelve: A COMBAT OF DREAMS Sulu enters this log entry. Star Base Twenty-Eight: it was previously mentioned that there are only 17 Star Bases. Picasso-like: Page 89 Page 90 "...offense against the natural order..." a rare pseudo-religious phrasing from Spock. Page 91 recension: Spock-One uses the term here to mean "uncorrected original." Spock-Two counters, "...your literary metaphor is far from clear, let alone convincing." smudgy incunabular: another literary reference, Spock-One compares the original Spock to a difficult to read early edition of a book. Page 92 "Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" Spock-Two quotes Shakespeare's Othello, Act 5. Othello directed the quote at the villainous Iago. The list of drowned creatures Kirk sees comes from a variety of sources, and touch on or hint at the continuities of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, H. P. Lovecraft, Larry Niven, James Joyce, L. Ron Hubbard, Icelandic Sagas and Blish's own work. Tying all these works to the universe of Star Trek, then only three years old and hardly in the same company as these giants, is a bold and interesting move on the part of Blish. Skopolamanders: no known reference. This is possibly a Joycean combination of the words scopolamine and salamander. Since many salamanders excrete poisons and other toxic chemicals when threatened, a skopolamander may excrete a poison that has effects similar to scopolamine. An overdose of scopolamine can cause delirium, delusions, paralysis, stupor and death, all things that threaten Kirk, Scotty and Spock at this point in the novel. Tribbles: a reference to the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Tribbles are small round fury creatures that simply purr, eat and reproduce. Unipeds: Creatures with one foot. Unipeds have a long history. In chapter twelve of Iceland's epic Saga of Eric the Red, a Viking is struck down by a uniped, a one legged warrior wielding a bow and arrow. On the 13th century Mappa Mundi is a drawn a creature called the sciapod, who shelters himself from the sun with his single great foot. (http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/Einfaettr.shtml) In the Stanley G. Weinbaum short story "Parasite Planet" (1935) a uniped is a kangaroo-like animal that travels by leaping on a single massive leg. It uses its ten-foot beak to spear its prey. Gormenghastlies: a reference to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series. Ores: could this be a typo for Orcs, and originally a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien? Tnucipen: A possible reference to Tnuctip, from Larry Niven's Known Space series. Like the possible reference to Orcs, this may also be a typo, or Blish may have simply wanted to hint at the word. Beademungen: From Blish's short story "Common Time," which presents an unusually strange race of aliens called the clinesterton beademungen. Escallopolyps: no known reference. Could be a combination of the words escallop (a variant spelling of the word scallop) and polyp. A creature that strange brings to mind things Lovecraftian, and indeed there are hints of such darkness throughout this chapter. James Blish and H. P. Lovecraft exchanged letters, and in one Lovecraft says, "You are fortunate in securing copies of the hellish and abhorred Necronomicon. Are they the Latin texts printed in Germany in the fifteenth century, or the Greek version printed in Italy in 1567, or the Spanish translation of 1623? Or do these copies represent different texts?" (http://www.geocities.com/soho/9879/nechist.htm) On page 81-82, Kirk sees a creature described as: "...a monstrous object, dull green in colour but with a lustrous surface, whose exact nature he found impossible to classify. It was at least as big as an Indian elephant and just as obviously alive, but he could not even be sure whether it was animal or vegetable. It had no head, and seemed to consist entirely of thick bulbous tentacles- or shoots- which had been stuck onto each other at random, and which flexed and groped feebly...The thing did not look dangerous- only, somehow, faintly obscene..." This is a very Lovecraftian description, but Blish undermines the horror by comically having the creature support itself with a crutch. Later, on page 92, after listing all the strange creatures Kirk sees during the illusion, Blish ends with, "...a veritable zoo of drowned corpses, including a gradually increasing number of things so obscene that even Kirk...could not bear to look at them for more than an instant." Lovecraft may not have been a huge influence on the writings of Blish, but we see a tip of the hat from Blish to his old friend in these passages. Wogs: A very odd term to use. In Britain it's a racist term for any non-white person, possibly derived from the word Golliwog, a popular black-faced minstrel doll. A Scientologist uses the term to describe non-Scientologists. Fellow science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard developed Scientology and Blish may have been aware of this use of the term. This non-racist interpretation fits in with the general character of this list of creatures, borrowed as they are from many other works of science fiction and fantasy. Reepicheeps: Reepicheep is a character from C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series. He appears in Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle. He is a large talking mouse who carries a rapier and has a large plume stuck behind his ear. As a species represented here, Kirk must be seeing the drowned corpses of intelligent mice. Blish was a member of a C. S. Lewis society. Exoteratology: An exoteratologist studies the peoples and/or biologies of extraterrestrial lifeforms. (http://www.harperbruce.net/eleniantales/embanding5.htm) Apparently coined by Blish, today we use the term exobiology. Page 93 baobab: a kind of tree. Titanian mold: A form of life found on , the largest moon of Saturn. The last paragraph contains a typo, and begins with a spurious quotation mark. "...the telepathic/hypnotic skills of the Vulcan hybrids..." Presumably Blish refers here to the two Spocks, not to Vulcan hybrids as a whole. Page 94 Newtonian: a reference to Isaac Newton's third law of motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Blish suggests that psychic battles are not governed by Newtonian physics. "...Spock One soaring aloft...upon bats' wings..." Completing his appearance of satanic evil. According to Ketterer, Spock Two's victory over Spock One amounts to Blish, "...in fantasy... exorcis(ing) his cancerous self." (Ketterer; 269) Page 95 Finis opus coronant: A Latin proverb: "How a project ends is its crown." It can also mean "the ends justifies the means." (http://www.righthandpointing.com/latin/?p=18) Kirk took Latin. Chapter Thirteen: THE STEEL CAVE Page 96 Sulu, as Captain, continues the logs. Sulu intends to drop a log buoy before combat. Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Kirk refers to the shuttlecraft as "the gig." claymore: a type of sword, though Councilor Claymare humorously thinks Scotty is referring to him. Page 100 Page 101 Spock uses his communicator to open the shuttlecraft door remotely. Blish here talks about "glow-pups": tubes of rarified ethon gas that were continuously excited by a built-in radioactive source, the half-life of which is 25,000,000 years. Though "ethon gas" is fictional, light bulbs powered by trace amounts of radioactive material do exist. Page 102 Page 103 noo: for now (Scottish slang) leetle: little (Scottish slang) bollixed: ruined (English slang) sair: sore; in this context, "a lot" gud: good (Scottish slang) ye: you (Scottish slang) "Sair gud for ye." Good for you. (Scottish slang) dinna: do not (Scottish slang) ken: know (Scottish slang) bu: but (Scottish slang) hoot mon: yo, dude (Scottish slang) David against Goliath: From the Bible, 1 Samuel 17. It has come to metaphorically suggest any battle in which something small faces something big. Scotty refers to being without a sling, the weapon David used to slay Goliath. richt: right (Scottish slang) canna: cannot (Scottish slang) wasna: was not (Scottish slang) sich: such (Scottish slang) mickle: great (Scottish slang) fashes: vexes (Scottish slang) tae: to (Scottish slang) Page 104 nae: no (Scottish slang) isna: isn't (Scottish slang) Spock figures out that the warp drive built into the shuttlecraft is powered from Hilbert space, from "...which hydrogen atoms are born...a method of tapping the process of continuous creation." If such a thing was discovered and made feasible, even in the world of Star Trek, it would have fantastic, dramatic effects. ampere: God: a rare instance of God being mentioned in Star Trek. ha'e: have (Scottish slang) thot: that (Scottish slang) "Hubris...Downfall of the Greeks." Chapter Fourteen: A VISITATION OF SPIRITS Page 105 Kirk is again recording the Captain's Logs. Commander Koloth: Klingon battleship Destruction: Page 106 Terran humanity: humans from Earth The affair of the Xixobrax Jewelworm: The first meeting of Kirk and Koloth, the story is not told, but does explain how Kirk and Koloth know each other in "The Trouble with Tribbles." Dispute over the colonization of Sherman's Planet: A reference to the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Korax: Koloth's first officer, as seen in "The Trouble with Tribbles." Page 107 The Organians arrange for Time to slow down for Koloth and his ship, and he will be chasing the Enterprise until the end of time. Page 108 Bosklave: a Klingon planet or base of some strategic importance. The Enterprise could have destroyed it with little resistance. Page 109 stellor: a form of currency Romulans: First seen in the episode "Balance of Terror." eglons: presumably some sort of Klingon bird of prey, like and eagle, but this is only a guess. Enterprise has 430 people in its crew. Page 110 Page 111 The Grand Senate of the Klingon Empire: "a relic of a recorded ten thousand years of internecine warfare before the Klingons had achieved space flight and planetary unity..." Page 112 The Klingons are prevented from space flight for a thousand years as a result of their attack on the Organians. The Klingon Empire is no more. Chapter Fifteen: ... "YOU MAY BE RIGHT" Page 113 Page 114 "...true telepaths are exceedingly rare in the universe..." Melkotians: From the episode "Spectre of the Gun." In his footnote Blish refers to the episode under the title he used in his Star Trek Three adaptation. Blish used the original script title "The Last Gunfight." (http://www.fastcopyinc.com/orionpress/articles/last_gunfight.htm) Page 115 "There are many instances recorded in Earth history of apparent telepathic links between monozygotic twins..." telempathy: an emotional rapport. Persons with this ability are often called empaths. Page 116 Page 117 Scientific Advisory Board: A Federation science group. Star Base Sixteen: The Enterprise is to report there for two weeks maintenance and new orders. Lieutenant Purdy: A communications officer from Star Base Sixteen. Uhura hopes he's cute, and plans to teach him Eurish. Page 118 Spock dismisses the question as to the existence of an immortal soul as not testable and therefore meaningless. "I stole the whole question whether the transporter can transport the soul from Larry Niven" -James Blish. (Ketterer; 357) Show me :moved to User talk:AT2Howell